Wednesday, August 03, 2016

In our last piece, we
pinpointed some of the obvious factors which have greatly contributed tothe outstanding success and rather
surprising longevity of Rift Online, one of which was the outstanding quality
of their player-base and the simply astonishing results of their
player-retention strategy. There are obviously more sides to this coin though,
and one of these other sides is the actual distribution of the player-base. Rift
Online has essentially been quite successful all over the world, so player
base-wise, it definitely does not have all its eggs in one basket. Most of the
currently active players are from the US, and North America in general, then
Europe, Russia and Australia. The game has seen some rather unexpected growth
in Brazil too, in recent years no less, so there's apparently still plenty of
upside to it, especially in areas of the world not usually associated with MMO
traffic.

Another major part of the success-recipe
was obviously the Ascendant Souls system, which, back when Rift launched, was
an MMO innovation. What it essentially accomplished was to give people control
over what was the "class system" in other such games, allowing people
to design their own. People have apparently always enjoyed creating their own
combinations of abilities, so much so in fact that there were/are players out
there who have created more than 20 different presets they can switch between
at will. The Soul system has therefore been a massive boon for the game, acting
as a sort of launch pad for players into the more advanced sections of the
game, a game-component which is to this day extremely popular.

To make things even more
enjoyable for their players, the creators of Rift have made it possible for
them to move between worlds at the press of a button -another feature highly
valued by their loyal customers. Bosses have been kicked up by a notch in the
game as well: the first expansion introduced final bosses called Colossi, who
wrought havoc on the environment itself. These NPCs were as tall as 50 players
and they literally took teams of 100s of players to bring down. The sheer
epic-ness of such encounters was also obviously wildly popular.

Through most of the existence
of the game, creators not only listened to players, they readily implemented
their suggestions too. For instance, in regards to the planes invading the
world of Rift called Telara, players asked whether they could ever actually
take the fight to these planes. In Nightmare Tide, the second expansion of the
game, just that was implemented. The most popular expansion of the game - the
one of which players are still the fondest - was the first expansion, Storm
Legion. It has been proven quite a few times in the gaming industry that if an
IP creator can follow up a great launch with an even better second act, success
is more or less assured, together with a place for the game in the hearts of
its fans forever.

Philip Thalberg is a member of the eSports newsdepartment of
GosuTeam, the team behind the world's top competitive gaming destination.